Owners of ancient water vessels are likely to be quite pleased with the Senate, which voted overwhelmingly this month to generally exempt them from a fire-retardant materials requirement. But that is about the extent of bipartisan legislation to emerge from Congress during the first 100 days of unified Republican governance.

A divisive election, the growing use of arcane rules that disenfranchise the minority party and a chaotic White House have combined to create one of the least productive opening acts by Congress in recent memory.

In the Senate, legislators have appeared to stop trying. Important Cabinet appointments, a Supreme Court confirmation and a vast array of deregulation measures have all been passed without the 60-vote requirement that was once customary. Driven at once by haste and partisanship, Congress has been hampered from moving forward on the tax code, infrastructure and the health care law.

In the House, not even a healthy Republican majority has proved enough. On Thursday, House Republican leaders again failed to round up enough votes among their own members, leaving some in the party politically exposed in the process. A beloved House tax proposal appears to have been jettisoned by the Trump administration before it could even get going.

The net result is the appearance of frenetic action, and the reality is few accomplishments.

Senate committees, largely hamstrung by divisive fights over Cabinet nominees, have barely moved forward with any bills. Most measures that have passed have done so through an obscure rule that allows Congress to overturn prior presidential orders, passing with little scrutiny and minimal support. The broad policy agenda that Republicans bragged would be forthcoming if they could only win control in Washington has eluded them.

“The only honest answer is that the election has made it difficult in the committees,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who longs for bipartisan solutions to at least some of the flaws in the health care law.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recently told committee leaders like Alexander to “bring me bipartisan bills that are good for the country, and I’ll put them on the floor,” Alexander said. But so far, they have not been forthcoming.

President Donald Trump has shunned Senate Democrats despite early flirtations about working with them. While President Barack Obama certainly pressed forward with a liberal agenda when Democrats controlled Washington during his first term, he spent time and energy trying — and failing — to woo Republicans to join in passing the health care and even the stimulus bills.

“We haven’t been consulted at all,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, who seems to have settled into implacable opposition. “I hope and really expect in the next several months that will change.” By shunning the minority and pursuing a strongly partisan agenda, he said, the result for congressional Republicans was, “They are not getting anything done.”

For their part, Democrats, still seething from the election and eager to please their affronted base, have done all they can to stymie what little the Republicans have tried to do, dragging out Cabinet nominations to the best of their procedural ability and instigating a nasty fight over Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court that ended a decades-long tradition of bipartisan comity on such nominees.

“Everyone is looking ahead to the next election all the time and this appears to be a tipping point,” said Brian Walsh, a former Republican aide in the Senate. “Democrats are catering to their base and their base is beside themselves that President Trump is in the White House.”

The nature of the parties themselves — and the Americans who support them — has had perhaps the deepest impact of all.

A Pew Survey conducted last spring found that anger and distrust among Americans for opposite party members was at its highest level in nearly a quarter-century. Among those polled who said they voted regularly and either volunteered for or donated to campaigns, 70 per cent of Democrats and 62 per cent of Republicans said they feared the other party.

“There are two dimensions here,” said Sarah A. Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University. “There is the degree of polarisation among voters, and how apart the parties find themselves.”

She noted that changes to Medicare, the welfare system, environmental regulations and other laws were once accomplished with broad coalitions of members from both parties that no longer really exist in Congress.

“If there is anything specific to Trump here,” Binder said, “it is his historic degree of unpopularity, which means there is very little hope or chance that he could provide cover for his own party to take controversial votes, and no chance in hell Democrats will take such a vote because the president has asked them to.”

Republicans have made it clear that they will not be working with Democrats on health care or on changes to the tax system.

But they insist that other areas will offer new opportunities. For instance, Alexander’s committee recently passed four bipartisan public health bills that will soon head to the Senate floor. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he expected an infrastructure effort to emerge. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said a bill on Iran sanctions would soon be forthcoming.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he was working with Democrats on mental health and child abuse bills, among other things.

“These are really big things,” Blunt said. “But I do think we need to look for more things to establish a situation where we are making bipartisan policy again.”

source : GULF NEWS